Merritt Healthcare Advisors: 133 qualified founder conversations in 90 days

The client

What Merritt was solving for

Merritt Healthcare Advisors is a healthcare investment bank. They engaged DealSource Systems to build origination coverage across the healthcare businesses that fit their mandates, rather than relying on inbound deal flow and broker relationships alone.

Before this engagement, Merritt's origination coverage depended on inbound relationships and periodic outreach pushes, the same pattern most investment banks run. That produces deals, but not predictably, and not at a rate that compounds. Merritt wanted standing coverage across the healthcare businesses that fit their mandates: not a burst of outreach tied to one banker's calendar, but an ongoing system.

The approach

How the engine was applied

The same four-layer engine described in how the origination engine works was built around Merritt's specific mandates: mapping the universe of healthcare businesses that fit their criteria, monitoring for the signals that indicate an owner is ready for a conversation, and running founder-grade outreach that turns a signal into a conversation on the calendar. Because Merritt operates on the sell side as an advisor, the same infrastructure surfaces owners considering an exit before they have engaged another bank, rather than only surfacing buy-side targets.

The trajectory

Why the numbers compound rather than spike

The 14-conversations-in-3-weeks figure shows the system reaching working speed quickly. The more telling number is what happened next: 133 conversations by day 90, and a sustained run rate of roughly 13 new conversations per week five months in, after Merritt chose to double outreach volume. That is the difference between a campaign, which decays after the initial push, and standing infrastructure, which a firm can turn up when it wants more coverage.

Multiple deals have advanced out of these conversations. The engagement is ongoing.